Japan's LDP could Use Some Competition

For close to 40 years after 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) dominated Japan’s competitive party system. Opposition parties were not able to mount a successful challenge to LDP rule at the national level, but they had an important impact on policy and the political process. Japan had one dominant party but not a one-party system.

The opposition was strong enough to prevent the adoption of many policies for which the LDP fought hard — constitutional revision, government financial support for the controversial Yasukuni shrine and the reintroduction of prewar morals sildenafil citrate femme jelly education. Broad popular support for the Japan Socialist Party’s (JSP) positions on rearmament and on defending the liberties enshrined in the constitution made it impossible for the LDP to implement key policies it espoused in its initial party platform in 1955.

Half a century later, the LDP is again pushing these policies forward with renewed vigour.

Polarised party systems with deep ideological and policy divisions tend to undermine political stability. However, in postwar Japan the tug and pull between a right-leaning LDP and a left wing opposition dominated by the JSP created a dynamic tension that drew the system towards the centre. Over time the LDP — which started out determined to overturn many of the political reforms adopted during the American occupation and write a new Constitution — downplayed its revanchist goals and made retaining political power its overarching objective. Emphasising a pragmatic approach, the LDP became the pre-eminent party of the centre.

The socialists did not make a comparable adjustment in their political orientation and moved to the left. Doing so led elements on its right wing to break off to form the Democratic Socialist Party and also made room for Komeito, formed in 1964, to occupy space that had opened up to the left of the LDP and the right of the JSP.

In the 1990s, the demise of the JSP seemed to be leading to a reordered political party system centred on competition between the LDP on the centre-right and the newly formed centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). It seemed possible that an alternation of power between two dominant parties might become the new normal. That view seemed to be confirmed when the DPJ enjoyed a landslide victory in the 2009 lower house election and took control of the government.

However, it was not to be. The three years the DPJ held power proved to be a disaster for the party and a godsend for the LDP. Many factors contributed to the DPJ’s failure, among the most important being the ineptitude of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, the effort by Ichiro Ozawa to control the party, the party’s bureaucrat-bashing approach, poor handling of the crises created by the Tohoku earthquake and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. It looked as though the party might be getting its bearings under Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, but by then it was too late.

Since losing power to the LDP in 2012, the Democrats have been at a loss as to how to recover public support. Under chairman Katsuya Okada the Democratic Party, as it is now known, opted to define its goals not in terms of what the party stands for but what it stands against. It is against collective self-defence, against the classified secrets act and against constitutional revision.

Now it has a new leader, Renho Murata, the first female to lead a major Japanese political party. The former model and TV presenter, whose father is Taiwanese and mother Japanese, brings a fresh face to a homogeneous Japanese political world dominated by older men. However, she has an enormous task ahead in building party unity and formulating concrete alternative policies, especially on the economy, which is consistently the primary concern of voters.

Renho — she goes by her first name alone — will need to convince the public that she has a realistic understanding of security issues and that if her party held government again, they would not make a mess of it. Escaping the image of a party that stands for nothing but opposing LDP policies will be no easy task.

Public opinion is critical of LDP policies but the kind of intensity that led people to demonstrate in large numbers against the LDP years ago is simply not there anymore. The Democratic Party’s effort to make opposition to constitutional revision the key issue in the 2016 upper house election campaign gained little traction. Prime Minister Abe downplayed the constitutional issue and emphasised the importance of sticking to his economic que contiene la viagra strategy. Democratic Party leaders never articulated an economic policy of their own.

Now that the LDP is no longer being pulled to the centre by parties on the left, the party’s more conservative members are demanding that the party return to its roots and fulfil the vision of its founders. The changing dynamics of party politics in Japan has set in sildenafil en farmacias motion the LDP’s rightward shift.

Those on the party right reject the pragmatic, economics-first strategy of the ‘conservative mainstream’ (hoshu honryū) as an unprincipled betrayal of the party’s ideals and goals. Prime Minister Abe, for example, has criticised his party for becoming a ‘party to maintain power’ rather than seeking to fulfil its original platform — the revision of the American-drafted constitution in particular. Abe believes he has a responsibility to give priority to the LDP’s goals as set out by his grandfather, Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, more than half a century ago.

As far as the LDP’s opposition is concerned, there is no future for the Democrats or any party that defines its raison d’etre in terms of what it opposes and that avoids taking clear positions on difficult issues of national security policy. The sad truth is that never in Japan’s postwar history has the political opposition been as enfeebled as it is now. Renho has her work cut out for her.

Japan’s political party system will be reinvented, one way or another. It is possible that reinvention will leave the LDP so strong and the opposition so impotent that Japan evolves into something similar to a one-party system in which the checks and balances essential to democratic governance are drastically weakened. Japan needs to find a new formula to sustain a system that cleaves toward the centre. The tug between revanchist conservatives and Marxist-dominated progressives that helped keep the centre on centre in the past is no longer relevant. Japan requires the presence of a catch-all centre-left party that offers the public a realistic alternative to the LDP.

Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom from 1992 to 2007. Prime Minister of the UK between 2007 and 2010. Inaugural 'Distinguished Leader in Residence' at New York University. Advisor at World Economic Forum

Dr Steinbock is an internationally recognized expert of the multipolar world. He focuses on international business, international relations, investment and risk among all major advanced economies and large emerging economies. In addition to advisory activities (www.differencegroup.net), he is affiliated with India China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and EU Center (Singapore). For more, please see http://www.differencegroup.net/. Research Director of International Business at India China and America Institute (USA) and Visiting Fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).

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